/tmp/lab

Consumer B Gone enables you to block a shopping cart by just playing some tones out of your mobile phone speaker as a song or as a ringtone. Consumer B Gone is born from the incredible shock that the shopping cart wheel could be remotely locked if you tried to exit the supermarket parking lot.

The root cause of it was an antenna (a wire in the ground at the exit of the parking lot) which sent a “Lock” signal to 2 of the 4 shopping cart wheels.

If an antenna can do it, I can do it too! The first idea that emerged was to create some hardware to generate such signal… but the hardware didn’t work, so the logic was to test the generated signal against the original signal… and to use a soundcard to record both!

Well… if one soundcard can record, maybe it could be used also to replay??? Replay of course in the adequate coil that serves as an antenna… But hey, wait! What if the coil to be used was the one in the computer’s speaker? Guess what: IT WORKS.

And what about an MP3 File on mobile phones? Guess what again, IT WORKS TOO!!!

(more…)

After the BackTrack3 Live SD card for EEE, I continued the distribution exploration with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) operating system on their brand new XO laptops and their slick and simple GUI called Sugar.

Before jumping into “did this, done that”, current advances in SD card and USB memory sticks sizes, bootable distribution and virtualization take computing to a different level.

Remember when you use to insert a MSDOS diskette into your computer to boot it? Each new operating system could be booted on the same old PC by merely changing the diskette and rebooting? Of course, there were not as many OS as now. This is where the fun begin.

Now, a child can have “his own computer” by just possessing a SD-card. All his changes to his environment will be persistent. He will be able to add programs without depending or affecting anyone. 2 Gb SD card are as cheap as 10 euros now. On such a card, you can have OLPC Sugar, Ubuntu or Debian. And guess what, these are not mutually exclusive. For proof is my experiment by Booting my EEE pc with Xubuntu running Sugar GUI borrowed from standard OLPC / XO distribution. These SD or USB storage are bootable even if they are formatted as VFAT, that means, readable on a standard Windows PC.

On top of this, Kevin’s SD card or USB key may also store a Virtual Machine application (Qemu or Virtual Box are free alternatives to VMware) which may enable him to run his own environment without rebooting daddy’s computer. Such freedom may transform PCs into a commodity where you actually boot your own environment.

Speaking of which, I did some test also running OLPC XO Fedora Core-based distribution in VMware Fusion on my MacBook and it runs nicely, without crashes or else.

In the dark quietness of the lab, using a special lens shaped like the leg of a wine drinking glass, a light source, and a piece of cardboard, we saw the Einstein Ring today. In space, these rings and associated shapes appear when light from distant sources is bent by a massive galaxy or group thereof. Our lens bends light exactly the same way a black hole weighting 75% of Earth mass would. This experiment, and the background about this phenomena are described in details in the paper didactical experiment on gravitational lensing

Here is a Tutorial on how to boot your EEE pc with USB-key or SD-card that I wrote coming back from Indonesia.

The cool thing is that you can have as many 1Gb or 2Gb SD-cards for as many distribution you need to work with. Let’s say you need to use Debian for some compile jobs, Nexenta for some Open Solaris testing and Backtrack3 for some security/hacking jobs? Easy, you just install each of these distribution on a different SD-card (10 euro these days for a 2Gb SD-card) and using one is just as easy as changing disks and rebooting it.

As we are also developping the OLPC France initiative, EEE pc provides an interesting alternative to the XO. Being able to test out the distribution in such a way adds to the “technology fluidity” of such platforms. More to come

Right now, testing Dynagen CISCO emulator. That thing is groovy!

http://www.dynagen.org/tutorial.htm

http://www.dynagen.org/

One of our first project is to get proper sunlight into the basement. We have thus started to work on a SkyLight that will provide us with light similar to the sun (below this thick concrete shelter).

Currently our plans are to use 6000K fluorescent tubes that provides “Daylight” glare, combined with colored lights that will restore a warm atmosphere.